The issue of poor mental health and inadequate services to treat it has steadily been seeping into the lives of more of the Midland community, and this is an issue that continues to concern Midland ISD Superintendent Ryder Warren.

“We’re having a conversation as a community right now about just the mental health services, especially as they relate to children,” he said. Wednesday. “We don’t have (services) in the community right now.”

Warren said suicide often is quickly attributed to bullying, but this attitude only focuses on one potential cause for a child to follow through with such a tragic decision.

“I’ve always told people that as the superintendent in Midland — or if I was the superintendent in any school district in the nation — I will never stop bullying. Bullying is unfortunately a part of our society. We as adults sometimes aren’t as nice to each other as we should be and we should know better.

“Kids are going to feel bullying and kids are going to bully,” Warren said. “How you handle that bullying speaks to how mentally healthy you are. Kids who aren’t able to cope with that because of whatever’s happening in their lives are who we’re really trying to get on, trying to get services for them.”

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death for Texans and the third leading cause of death among children ages 15 to 24, according to a 2011 report by Texas Suicide Prevention, a coalition of state and local agencies, academic institutions, non-profits and other organizations.

The year of that report, Midland experienced a spike in teen suicides. The self-inflicted deaths of three high school students: one from Midland High School, another from Lee High School and a third from Midland Christian School started a trend here, and 10 Midland children have died by suicide in the past five years, Warren said.

“When we started seeing these occurrences of suicide happening, it scared everybody, so we started a conversation very quickly,” he said. “Once we started talking to kids about their feelings, about what was happening in their lives, we started getting outcries from everywhere.”

Children as young as second grade began to reveal feelings that could lead to serious consequences, and such outcries were spread across all ages, ethnicities and socioeconomic classes, he said.

“It’s great they’re telling us now and it’s great they’re trusting us with this information, but it’s very sad that we have so many kids with those issues in their lives,” Warren said. “But truly for me, with all the money floating around Midland, this place should have an organization (that treats children’s mental health).”

Basically, as mental health services stand now, any MISD student whose mental health condition rises to the level of an emergency, must be referred by their school to Midland Memorial Hospital. Then the hospital or county health officials would place them in treatment facilities in San Angelo, or as far as Fort Worth.

“That’s the issue,” Warren said. “We’ve had to send them out of our community because there is no place to place a child on an inpatient basis and there are very few psychologists or psychiatrists in the community that see children.”

Suicide, however, is not the only tragic consequence of mental health issues. At Wednesday’s meeting at PDAP, the Midland Coalition discussed the importance of focusing on mental health when treating substance abuse issues. Staff members from Oceans Behavioral Hospital — a local facility that provides inpatient hospitalization for psychiatric illness in people 13 and older — joined the discussion for the first time. Staffers explained how they had noticed many of their adult patients — 18 to 54 — had not only mental health issues, but often struggled with substance abuse as well.

Bringing these two conversations together is a great start, but coalition member Dennis Bade brought up the question of treating children under 13.

“Young children can’t always express their feelings in words so it comes out in behavior. Then our doctors have the perfect solution for that: adderol and other kinds of behavior modifying pills. But then these kids get older and they get worse because those previous feelings have not truly been dealt with.”

With so many young children in the community already struggling with mental health issues, it’s past time to start providing resources for them.

“I don’t know why (this problem would be getting bigger),” Warren said. “But I know that we just don’t really have the tools to combat it.”